“Hmmronk, Skrrrrape, Schttttokke”. Searching for Automatism in Music
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N ICOLE MARCHESSEAU “Hmmronk, Skrrrrape, Schttttokke”. Searching for Automatism in Music The mind then proves to itself, fragmentarily of course, but at least by itself, that «everything above is like everything below» and everything inside is like everything outside. The world thereupon seems to be like a cryptogram which remains indecipherable only so long as one is not thoroughly familiar with the gymnastics that permit one to pass at will from one piece of apparatus to another.1 urrealist Manifesto(s) author and the movement’s most prominent, long-standing figure-head André Breton iterated unwaveringly on the integral connection between Sautomatism and surrealist expression. To Breton, automatism was surrealism’s catalyst. The unconscious, unmediated “world below” was to be accessed and expressed outwardly through the “gymnastics” of automatic processes. Breton, who was by his own account not the most likely candidate to address the topic of surrealism and music due to his lack of understanding and sometimes blatant repulsion of the latter, nevertheless suggested at the close of the essay Silence is Golden that perhaps there is a «virgin soil of sound» which is somehow accessible.2 Accepting Breton’s premises that surrealism is rooted in automatism and that there may indeed be some sort of sonic expression of the surreal, we might then ask, what might the automatic processes, those employed to access the roots of a Surreal music’s «virgin soil», entail? Further, what does surrealism as expressed through music sound like? By investigating a brief history of automatism, its importance in surrealist literature, the connection between surrealism and music, and potential sonic 1 ANDRÉ BRETON, On Surrealism in Its Living Works (1953), in ID., Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver - Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1969, pp. 295-304: 302-303. 2 ANDRÉ BRETON, Silence is Golden, trans. by Louise Varèse, «Modern Music», XXI, 3 (1944), pp. 150-154: 154. Gli spazi della musica vol. 7 (2018) ISSN: 2240-7944 http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/spazidellamusica NICOLE MARCHESSEAU articulations of automatism, this essay will address the possibility of and problems asso- ciated with automatic expression through music. In the opening pages of the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) Breton elaborates on freedom and madness, the marvellous, the relevance of dreams, Freud, poetry, and, to a lesser extent, visual art. Soluble Fish, an automatically composed novel, concludes the Mani- festo. With the exception of a brief analogy, Breton’s musings are bereft of musical refer- ences. Where the concept of music does manifest itself, he presents a list of specific surreal attributes of the works and lives of well-known Frenchmen (mostly writers), subsequently explicating that the reason why they are not Surrealists beyond the attributes of their works is because they did not wish to «serve simply to orchestrate the marvelous score. They were instruments too full of pride».3 Beyond this analogy, which ironically portrays sur-reality as «a marvelous score» (one may rhetorically ask, is Breton actually referring to a sonic «score» at all?) while simultaneously giving musical instruments the personified potential of pride, the exclusion of the concept of a surrealist music reflects Breton’s overall distaste for the art. This is evidenced not only by the dearth of its appearance to any significant extent in his early writings, but also more overtly in his 1944 essay on music Silence d’or, translated as indicated above to Silence is Golden. Also of note is the fact that the nature of Breton’s disdain was voiced once again later in his brief, unpublished written piece of 1955 on the music of Erik Satie. In this short declaration, Breton delved into the possible origins of his aversion: his own experience of music was one which, as he described it, had been «scrambled by birth».4 In this later document, Breton presents a point of view that had been seemingly altered by self-insight. The world of music was, almost too simply put, beyond his understanding. In his writing favourably about Satie (it is common knowledge that the composer was initially shunned by Breton in the 1920s Parisian surrealist heyday) we can observe Breton’s changed opinion, expressed not as a call for silent contemplation, but as a guarded tolerance that may be earned through the merits of the composer’s work. While therefore only the starting-point for this tripartite study of automatism, surrealism, and music, Breton’s decades-long distaste for the art form needs to be acknowledged at the outset since it was, in part, responsible for the near absence of musical material from the conversation. 3 ANDRÉ BRETON, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in ID., Manifestoes of Surrealism, cit., pp 1-47: 27. 4 ANDRÉ BRETON, [Texte sur Satie], original manuscript, 1955, available online at http://www.andrebreton.fr/work/56600100505260 (accessed on May 16, 2018). – 25 – “Hmmronk, Skrrrrape, Schttttokke”. Searching for Automatism in Music The concept of automatism was first documented in the mid-nineteenth century by the neuropsychiatrist Jules Baillarger who had «asked his patients to write down any thought that was coming to their minds».5 Automatism was further examined by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, and then more extensively by Pierre Janet and Frederic Myers. Early clinical documentations of expressions of automatism, even if they were poetic or artistic, were not considered as art, but rather as symptoms of pathology. In terms of automatism’s appropriation into surrealism, the seeds of Breton’s interest in neuropsychi- atry were sown while he was positioned as a medical orderly in Nantes, and later deepened when he undertook studies in neuropsychiatry and began caring for shell-shocked victims at a psychiatric centre during the First World War at Saint-Dizier. According to his then- peer and the future physician and author Théodore Fraenkel, Breton was disturbed by the fact that the poetry of his psychiatric inmates was, to him, superior to his own. 6 Following the war, Breton’s interest in neuropsychiatry was eclipsed by his engrossment in the writings of Sigmund Freud and his own literary ambitions. His interest in Freudian psycho- analysis, one kindled earlier while studying neuropsychiatry, surpassed his fascination with the automatism of Janet and Myers.7 Nevertheless, interest in the concept of automatism did spread to those in the surre- alist circle beyond Breton, and prompted explorations such as Les Champs Magnétiques, the collaboration co-authored by Breton and Philippe Soupault. Shuttering themselves in a room for weeks to accomplish their task, Breton and Soupault created this seminal 1920 surrealist work of automatic writing. Pure psychic automatism became famously central to the definition of surrealism enshrined in Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto. However, unlike the medium-channelled writings popular in Parisian culture of the time, surrealist automatism steered clear of spiritualist inclinations and drew instead from Freud’s work. Freud had employed “free association” writing tasks with his patients as a form of tapping into the unconscious mind, and the Surrealists drew from Freud’s language and methods, adapting these their own end. This reflected their keen interest not only in the products of automatism, but also the processes of it. As art scholar Willard Bohn phrased it: 5 JOOST HAAN - PETER J. KOEHLER - JULIEN BOGOUSSLAVSKY, Neurology and Surrealism. André Breton and Joseph Babinski, «Brain. A Journal of Neurology», CXXXV, 12 (2012), pp. 3830-3838: 3832. 6 Ibidem, p. 3835. 7 Cf. ALEXANDRA BACOPOULOS-VIAU, Automatism, Surrealism and the Making of French Psychopathology. The Case of Pierre Janet, «History of Psychiatry», XXIII, 3 (2012), pp. 259-276. – 26 – NICOLE MARCHESSEAU the primary function of Surrealism is clearly to liberate the Freudian unconscious, to tap its powerful forces via automatic writing, automatic speech, and the analysis of dreams. The superior reality (or surreality) that these forms of association embody is that of the unconscious itself, the exploration of which will expand our total consciousness.8 On the topic of the connection between music and surrealism, and by extension music and automatism, while the connection between surrealism and music was virtually uncharted territory during the twentieth century, surrealist sonic expression appears plausible, Breton’s opinion of the art form aside, particularly if we frame it within Breton’s more complete definition of surrealism. In his words surrealism is Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.9 It was in Erik Satie’s 1913 collection of three piano pieces titled Descriptions automatiques, explored in some musical detail in Sébastien Arfouilloux’s comprehensive tome on surrealism and music Que la nuit tombe sur l’orchestre,10 that the first mention of automatism in relation to music was made. With miniatures titled therein Sur une lanterne, and Sur un casque, what is perhaps most automatic, even surreal, about the pieces is not their sonic content, even for the period (when form and tonality were developing at an accelerated rate). To provide an example, Sur un vaisseau, the first of the three Descriptions, travels, albeit ambiguously, through tonal centres grounded in conventional triadic harmonies. These are articulated through a repeated rhythm to be played by the left hand. Above these tonal shifts are the playful and less rhythmically structured whimsical gestures of the right hand. Fairly straightforward as they are, though shifting in tonality and gesture, the more likely indicators of automatism at work in the three pieces of the collection are their accompanying spurts of written non-musical text.